The Range: The Tucson Weekly's Daily Dispatch

July Was the Hottest Month on Record in the Lower 48. Ever.

If you thought, between sudden rain showers, this July was insanely hot this year, you'd have something in common with climate scientists.

That chart up top is heatmap of last month's temperature anomalies compared to the combined average July temps from 1951 through 1980.

The conclusion? Things have been getting pretty toasty lately, which what NASA blames for why the world's weather has gone wacky.

“‘Climate dice,’ describing the chance of unusually warm or cool seasons, have become more and more ‘loaded’ in the past 30 years, coincident with rapid global warming,” [NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies director] James Hansen and colleagues wrote. “The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased....We can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.”

Interestingly, it appears that temperatures in Southern Arizona didn't deviate too much from the norm — maybe an average increase of a degree, at most — but the weather continues to be scorching, both here and in Phoenix.